Recipe: Danish Fried Onions

Danish Fried Onions
rec.food.recipes/Buffy Hyler/1994

The key is *very* thin slicing and dry-dry-DRY!

Take an onion (I used a yellow onion). Slice into rings very thin (as in rice paper thin). I can only do this using one of those gadgets that lets you set the thinness. You will end up with a pile of onion strings.

Take a handful or two, put them on a couple thickness paper towel. Cover with two more paper towels. Repeat until you have a stack of paper towels/onions until the onions are gone. Push down on the stack of paper towels and weight down and leave for a couple of hours. When you unstack, the onions should feel fairly dry.

Heat up oil. (I just set it on med-high and used about 3 inches in a very small (2 cup size) sauce pot). These cook very quickly and go from golden yummy to black yuck in seconds. Watch them at all times and be ready to scoop them out. Take a handful of the onions (too much will cause the oil to boil over...not all the moisture is gone!) and put it in the oil. As soon as they are golden, remove to a paper towel for draining. The reason for using the small pot was that in the larger one it took too long getting all the onions out before they turned black. Cooking time is probably a minute or less.

You should end up with these golden onion threads that are crispy crunchy and melt in your mouth. The hard part is making sure you don't snack too much on them so that enough is left over for the meal. I serve them over BBQ new york/fillet mignon steaks.